The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

The writing is often magnificent and, really, unsurpassable, but in passages of a stanza or in groups of several lines. What use is this book as a book, as an entire statement? Because Auden certainly intended it to have a use: it's a classification, a Pilgrim's Progress, an anatomy, a taxonomy of the state of human affairs and culture after World War II. There's a wonderful introduction by Alan Jacobs (wonderful: not insistent, but not rambling), which makes it clear that Auden's classifications of types, journeys, and temperaments comes from Jung, the Kabbalah, and other sources. In its ambition and its reliance on mythopoetic types, the book is like a rationalist's answer to "A Vision," and now that I've belatedly read it I see its show more confidence in classification as a shadow on "the Changing Light in Sandover."

But what use is it, this classification of temperaments into four types, this journey into disappointment, this faint reprieve at the end granted by love and the passive acknowledgment of the impossibility of salvation? Can anyone, now, see themselves in this? Is it possible to read this as something other than a mid-century project, impelled by its author's transient constellation of literary sources and idiosyncratic poetic ambition? I don't think so. I cannot imagine a state of mind in which I would feel comforted, or feel I'd gained insight, from being told there are Four Faculties, or that we need to be "too resigned" for happiness (that's Jacobs, but it's accurate), or that the necessary journey has seven stages, or that "age softens the sense of defeat / As well as the will to success" (p. 103), or that "we are mocked by unmeaning" (p. 33), and so on... the poem is filled with quotable conclusions, as hesitant and contextual as they may be.

The passivism (as opposed to pacifism) of the book's politics has attracted the attention of some writers, and "The Age of Anxiety" has been said to be exemplary for "our" age of political skepticism. Whether or not it makes sense to say we're in such an age (and it very nearly doesn't, because the notion is so thoroughly riddled with exceptions), this is not the book to give that position to the twenty-first century. It's a book of individual, isolated passages, some of which are really magnificent (pp. 30, 32, 33, 87, 103...). show less

Stilted. Not one of Auden's many brilliant works, even though it did get a Pulitzer. Maybe I have no taste.

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